My Treat
by Juni Cortez
Summary: [Matchstick Men] Frank drags Roy to dinner. Sorta slashy.


My Treat

A/N: Written for the contrelamontre food challenge in 45 minutes, more or less. Spoilers, but only if you look really really hard. Pre-Angela, although that should be apparent.

"I figured maybe you'd like to try something other than tuna once in awhile," Frank smiled, tilting his chair back so far that Roy honestly couldn't say whether he was more worried about his partner falling or putting his feet up on the table. "Y'know, like every other decade."

Roy tried to match Frank's smile with one of his own, knowing it was useless. They were partners, after all. Frank could read Roy just as easily as Roy could read him. "Uh, yeah, it's...it's very nice. It's a nice restaurant, I mean. Indoors." Frank smirked at that, shaking with barely-contained laughter. "What?"

Frank grinned again, and Roy marveled, as he often did, that his partner could actually pull off the con artist's supposed trademark: the devil-may-care smile. No matter how hard he tried, Roy could never manage it. Not even if you ignored the tics. He always looked slimy or crafty, or he let too much emotion creep into his eyes and looked just plain pathetic.

"You're miserable," Frank replied, raising his eyebrows and chuckling at Roy's horrified expression. "You are!" He leaned forward, the chair clattering to the floor,  drawing the attention of a disapproving waiter, and patted Roy's hand reassuringly. "Wait until the food comes. You'll like it. I promise."

Frank's touch was gentle, his hand soft, without any calluses. It was everything his boisterous con persona wasn't, and Roy found himself reluctant to move, reluctant to destroy this half-invented Frank that looked him in the eye like he had something to confess.

At that moment, the waiter arrived with the food and Roy dissolved into a series of tics and wondered exactly how clean Frank's hand had been and if he should really be eating food served to him by someone with a pierced eyebrow. It just seemed unsanitary.

For his part, Frank jerked away as though he'd been shocked, nearly upsetting his beer. "Ah, here we are," he greeted their server, and Roy couldn't help but notice how his partner's voice shook. "I have the lasagna, and he," Frank, now fully recovered, paused to get in a dramatic eye-roll, "has the linguini and clam sauce. With the sauce on the side."

The waiter departed and Roy watched Frank dig into his lasagna as though he hadn't eaten in weeks, although Roy knew for a fact his partner had mercilessly devoured a foot-long sub for lunch that day. He looked down at his own meal and thought wistfully of the neatly stacked cans of tuna in his fridge.

"You'd better eat that," Frank said through a mouthful of food, gesturing threateningly at Roy with his fork. "If you don't start eating, I'm gonna have to feed it to you. And you know I will."

Roy poked at the pasta. "How about I pay for dinner," he suggested hopefully, "and we call it even?"

Frank let out an exasperated sigh. "This is not me being cheap, Roy. It's me trying to get you to eat something decent. Here," he reached across the table with his fork and began mixing the pasta with the sauce. "The thing about linguini and clam sauce is, traditionally the linguini and the clam sauce are mixed together."

Roy stared at him miserably. While the food did smell nice, any appetite he might have had vanished at the thought of cockroaches scuttling across the kitchen floors, dirty plates heaped into dishwashers to be cleaned haphazardly, and when had this floor last been cleaned, anyway?

"Don't make me do this, Roy," Frank groaned. "It's gonna destroy my reputation if people see me feeding another man in public."

To appease him, Roy took a bite of the food and swallowed. "It's good," he said, stifling a gag reflex. "Very good."

Frank's smile was dazzling. "I told you so!" he smirked, effectively doubling Roy's misery.

Roy tried to grin back and, not surprisingly, failed. He took a few more bites of the food, just for Frank's sake, then instructed the waiter to wrap it up for him. "I had a big lunch," he apologized.

Frank, who normally would have picked up on the lie with what Roy called his partner's "built-in polygraph" and Frank termed his "bullshit-o-meter," Frank just kept on smiling and left the waiter an excessive tip, even by Roy's standards.

"Y'know," Frank said as he and Roy walked back to his car (he was carrying Roy's food, swinging the plastic bag the waiter had provided back and forth in a manner that would have disturbed Roy if he'd actually wanted to eat the food), "I'm really glad you liked this. I just wanted to do something for you, y'know?" He handed Roy the bag, some indefinable look in his eye as he stared over the hood of his car at the man who'd been his only constant in a life where his name, his accent, what he was selling, changed hourly. 

Had been. "Just for you. No strings attached."

  
  



End file.
